Texas Powers Past Virginia in Global Data Center Rankings. 4 Min Read. Alamy. Dallas has overtaken Northern Virginia as the world’s top primary data center market, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s latest Global Data Center Market Comparison report, reflecting how AI infrastructure demand is rewiring where large-scale digital infrastructure gets built.. The report ranked Dallas as the number one primary data center market globally, followed by Atlanta, Virginia, Columbus, and Johor. Austin-San Antonio and West Texas lead the secondary and tertiary market rankings, reinforcing Texas’s widening grip on AI infrastructure expansion.. “Power delivery timelines, land availability, community sentiment, and regulation are now playing a much larger role in determining where and how data centers get built,” John McWilliams, head of data center insights at Cushman & Wakefield, said in the report announcement.. John McWilliams, head of data center insights at Cushman & Wakefield, told Data Center Knowledge that this year’s rankings placed greater emphasis on near- and mid-term scalability rather than on operational scale alone.. Related:Gridlock or Growth? ERCOT Warns Texas AI Power Boom May Not Materialize. “As the industry shifts into a period of more managed growth, constraints around power availability and regulation are playing a larger role in shaping where data center development can occur,” McWilliams said. “Dallas and Texas stand out for their ability to support large-scale data center development more efficiently and with fewer near-term constraints.”. Industry analysts say the shift reflects a broader change in how AI infrastructure gets deployed.. “Power availability has decisively overtaken latency as the dominant site-selection variable for AI-centric capacity,” Alex Cordovil, research director at Dell’Oro Group, told Data Center Knowledge. “The scale of new campuses – often 500 MW to multiple gigawatts – means power becomes the gating factor.”. Cushman & Wakefield notes capacity under construction reached nearly 31.7 GW in 2025, more than double the 12.5 GW reported in the prior edition of the study. The study examined 107 global markets using 24 variables across power infrastructure, commercial real estate conditions, regulation, and development activity.. Texas Expands Beyond Dallas. Texas’s rise spans multiple layers of the infrastructure stack. Dallas continues to draw hyperscale and colocation growth tied to cloud and AI deployments. Momentum is also accelerating in Austin-San Antonio and West Texas, where operators see fewer infrastructure bottlenecks, larger land parcels, and faster paths to energized capacity.. Cordovil said the pattern is spreading well beyond Texas as developers search for regions with available power and faster utility access.. Related:The Breaking Points: Power Emerges as AI’s Defining Limit. “Secondary markets are structurally benefiting,” Cordovil said, pointing to regions including West Texas, central Ohio, Wisconsin, the Nordics, and the Iberian peninsula.. That shift has played out repeatedly across recent projects. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank’s Stargate initiative in Abilene helped push West Texas into the center of the AI infrastructure conversation. Meta significantly scaled its El Paso plans. Google pledged an additional $40 billion in US infrastructure investment, including major Texas operations. Soluna continued pitching West Texas as a destination for power-intensive AI workloads tied to stranded and renewable energy resources.. Together, the projects point to a broader industry migration already underway: AI infrastructure increasingly flows toward regions that can still assemble land, transmission access, and generation capacity at an industrial scale.. The report’s power delivery data underscores why. Cushman found average power delivery timelines for large-load projects now stretch to roughly five years across the Americas and EMEA. In the Asia-Pacific region, the average timeline sits closer to 2.7 years.. Related:Oklahoma Law Opens New Front in AI Data Center Power Debate. Developers are responding with power-from-the-land strategies, onsite or private generation, and expansion into secondary and tertiary markets where utility constraints remain less severe.. Cushman’s findings also mirror growing efforts by operators to work around long utility interconnection queues.. “Multi-year queues for large-load connections have driven a clear shift toward bring-your-own-power strategies, including on-site generation and behind-the-meter arrangements,” Cordovil said. “The AI buildout will not wait for utilities.”. Room to Scale. Northern Virginia remains the industry’s largest market by operational scale, but years of hyperscale growth have tightened utility coordination, transmission planning, and available capacity. Similar pressures are mounting in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Dublin.. Texas, by contrast, still offers room to sprawl. ERCOT’s independent grid structure, large generation pipeline, expansive transmission buildout, and abundant developable land give operators one of the few places where multi-gigawatt AI expansion still looks achievable on a realistic timeline.. In the AI era, the markets winning new deployments increasingly look like the ones that can energize them first.. About the Author
